Phelps Family History in Europe

King James of England had treated the Puritan cause with disregard,
but his successor Charles
I went a step further and actively tried to suppress them.
In 1630, the Pilgrims having first arrvied in Plymouth 10
years earlier, not less than seventeen vessels with from 1600-1700
emigrants arrived in New England. William
and George Phelps were among them. Shortly after William's
arrival in America, John
Phelps would serve as Clerk to the court that dethroned
and executed King Charles.

This was the during the time that later became known as The
Great Migration, when from 1620 to 1643 about twenty thousand
English men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic to settle
New England. Most of these early emigrants originated in the
five eastern England counties of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire,
Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk. These counties were a very educationally
and economically advanced area of Britain. Up to one-third of
the population of Norfolk and Suffolk countie s lived densely
settled and well-educated urban communities. In the Stour Valley
in Essex and Suffolk, 50,000 people worked in the textile industry,
which was very vulnerable to slowdowns in their European markets.
The dense population also made the region vulnerable to food
shortages caused by the disastrous harvests in 1628-30. Due to
the political instability in England after 1643, emigration slowed
considerably.

In 1630, a prosperous Suffolk clothier named John Winthrop organised
the Arbella fleet of 11 ships bound for New England. He wrote
to supporters in all five counties, from which he drew 375 of
his 695 known passengers. He later became the first Governor
of Massachusetts.

The book The
Phelps Family of America and Their English Ancestors
has led many Phelps descendants to believe that their original
ancestor in Simsbury was from Tewkesbury, but that has been
disproved. Pages 1-72 are about a William Phelps in
Tewkesbury, and pages
72 to 1,257 are about the descendants of William Phelps of Windsor, Connecticut.
For information on the origin of William Phelps in Crewkerne,
England, see The
Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620-1633,
(available in hardbound or CD-ROM),
(Volume III) by Robert Charles Anderson, and Myrtle Steven
Hyde, F.A.S.G. “The English Origin
of William Phelps of Dorchester, Mass., and Windsor, Conn.
with Notes on His Marriages,” The American
Genealogist (July 1990) 65:161-166.

William and George
Phelps were founders of Simsbury,
Connecticut. The Simsbury Historical Society owns and operates The
Phelps Homestead, a museum complex in the heart of Simsbury.
George's identity as Williams' brother has been generally disproved,
or at least not confirmed to professional reseacher's satisfaction.
It is usually accepted that he actually arrived aboard the Recovery of
London in 1635.

The War of the Revolution had a profound effect on the Town
of Simsbury. Nearly 1,000 Simsbury residents, more than in any
other war, served in the Revolution. One hundred Simsbury soldiers
engaged in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Noah
Phelps was the most noted hero, as it was his spying which
led to the capture of Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and his
Green Mountain Boys without firing a shot.